Counterfeiting has become commonplace in contemporary society and the wine industry, a multibillion dollar market, is no exception. (Group, M. A. a. A., World Wine Situation and Outlook. In Agriculture, U.S. D. o., Ed. 2006; Vol. 2009.) The combination of rare wine value, often demanding in excess of $5,000 per bottle, with the sharp rise in wine counterfeiting has attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Wilke, J. R., U.S. Investigates Counterfeiting of Rare Wines. The Wall Street Journal Mar. 6, 2007.) The list of counterfeit suspects is not just limited to individual private wine collectors, as auction houses have also been implicated for the distribution of faux wine (Frank, M., Counterfeit Bottles Multiply as Global Demand for Collectable Wine Surges. Wine Spectator Jan. 31-Feb. 28, 2007). This suggests that the problem corrupts both the supply and demand sides of the high end wine market. Attempts have been made to address this issue by using special labels (Locke, M. High-tech Systems Cork Counterfeit Wine. USA today.com website on the world wide web in news/techinnovations/2007-06-06-counterfeit-wine); however, the practiced counterfeiter easily defeats these measures by carefully draining these specially marked bottles and refilling with lower quality wine.
It is clear that the high end wine market is in desperate need of a technology that is capable of verifying the contents of a sealed bottle of wine, e.g., a rare, collectible wine bottle. Traditional spectroscopic absorption methods used to study molecular structure including ultra-violet/visible, infrared, and microwave as well as electron and nuclear spin resonance methods, mass spectrometry, and x-ray absorption are capable of fingerprinting wine. However, with the exception of four studies all of these approaches violate the wine bottle cork and seal, thus devaluing the wine. These approaches are obviously not attractive to investors spending several thousands of dollars for a single bottle. Both the intact bottle infrared (Cozzolino, D. Non-Destructive Analysis by VIS-NIR Spectroscopy of Fluid(s) in its original container. 2005), Raman (Eliasson, C.; Macleod, N. A.; Matousek, P., Non-invasive Detection of Cocaine Dissolved in Beverages Using Displaced Raman Spectroscopy. Analytica Chimica Acta 2008, 607, 50-53), and mass spectrometry (Lim, V.; Harley, S.; Augustine, M. P., A Screening Device for Full Intact Cork Tainted Wine Bottles. Manuscript in Progress.) based methods are not likely candidates for wine fingerprinting due to a variety of problems. For example, the infrared method suffers from bottle-to-bottle variations in glass composition and surface morphology leading to difficulties in coupling light into and out of the wine bottle. The developed methods eliminate this issue with ring electrodes. The Raman method requires large sample concentrations to overcome signal-to-noise issues. The mass spectrometry method is limited to probing cork born compounds like 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. The most promising of these four methods involves combining the full wine bottle nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) approach developed to study oxidative wine spoilage (Weekley, A. J.; Briuns, P.; Augustine, M. P., A Nondestructive Method of Determining Acetic Acid Spoilage in an Unopened Bottle of Wine. Journal of Enology and Viticulture 2003, 53, 18-3214; Weekley, A. J.; Briuns, P.; Sisto, M.; Augustine, M. P., Using NMR to Study Full Intact Wine Bottles. Journal of Magnetic Resonance 2003, 161, 91-98.) with small sample NMR methods used to fingerprint wine. The small sample studies use NMR spectroscopy to monitor amino acid ratios (Carpentieri, A.; Gennaro, M.; Amoresano, A., Rapid Fingerprinting of Red Wines by MALDI Mass Spectrometry. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry 2007, 389, 969-982.) or the partitioning of deuterium among the methyl and ethyl groups in ethyl alcohol and water (Martin, G. J.; Guillou, C.; Martin, M. L.; Cabanis, M. T.; Tep, Y.; Aerny, J., Natural Factors of Isotope Fractionation and the Characterization of Wines. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 1988, 36, 316-322.) along with rare element abundance (Lutz, O., Ascertainment of Boric Acid Esters in Wine by 11B NMR. Naturwissenschaften 1991, 78, 67-69; Greenough, J. D.; Jackson, H. P.; Longerich, H. P., Element Fingerprinting of Okanagain Valley Wines Using ICP-MS: Relationship Between Wine Composition, Vineyard, and Wine Color. Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research 1997, 75-83.) in wine to provide region specific fingerprinting. Although the preliminary testing of a full wine bottle NMR based authentication approach that exploits the relative concentration of ethyl alcohol, acetic acid, succinic acid, proline, and three borate esters in wine is promising, the method is complicated and requires the use of bulky equipment that cannot be made portable with existing technology. (Sobieski, D. N. From Ion Channels to Wine: Using Magnetic Resonance to Probe Dynamics and Chemical Composition. University of California Davis, Davis, 2008.)
Therefore, an easy to use, e.g., portable, apparatus and method for non-destructively and non-invasively fingerprinting the contents of a sealed container, such as a bottle of wine, are needed in the art.